How British Digital Agencies Can Add Value with Outsourcing

June 26, 2017

Posted by: Tony Peck

Category: General

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It’s time for web agencies in the UK to take a fresh look at outsourcing!

Development teams from offshore locations are filled with highly-skilled programmers, fluent in English, who are dying to add a lot of value to your project. They can reduce your timescale and save you a bundle – IF you can find the right team for YOUR project. But how can you do this?

If you’re a digital agency based in the UK, you’ll be familiar with the concept of outsourcing your web design and development abroad. If you’ve never done it before — or even if you have, but it didn’t turn out well – the prospect of hiring an offshore team can be unappealing. Let’s face it, outsourcing’s reputation can still be poor, even after many changes to the industry over the years. But you might not have much of a choice but to take another look.

Let’s look at those overheads

Hiring domestic developers can seem like a safe option. You’ll get a known quantity of skill and education, language fluency and high visibility of proceedings as they work right in your own office. Won’t you? Yes, to a certain extent these are true. But as anyone who has ever been an employer in the UK knows, paying salaries is only the beginning of the costs of in-house talent.

You have to provide them with a place to work, bathrooms, refreshments, computer equipment. There’s the workplace pension scheme, sick pay, employer’s contribution to National Insurance, employer’s liability, payroll costs, and you’re responsible for checking they have the correct documents, among many other employer obligations. UK software developers are highly-skilled, but thanks to the cost of living in this country, they’re also highly paid! You could burn through your budget quicker than they can turn a profit for you.

Control costs, boost your skills bank

Hiring a team from a country like India or Vietnam can represent a massive saving. And not only that, but it is much easier to see up front what the cost of engagement will be. Using teams as a way of supplementing your current workforce is a sensible and sustainable way of keeping your staff costs to a manageable level, without throwing the baby out with the bathwater! Unless you have only a small, well-defined project, I would typically recommend using outsourced staff as a boost to your talent pool, rather than a complete replacement.

Another problem in the UK is that, at the moment, there are more jobs than developers with the skills and experience you may need. Countries like India, for example, have pumped a huge amount into their education programmes and now they have the opposite problem. When there are more developers than jobs, keeping hold of your place is important and this can create great opportunities for UK web agencies who need to find more talent!

A new era of outsourcing

Yes, outsourcing has had a poor reputation in the past, but with a UK-based, accountable advisor with guaranteed results to help you work out the best route forward, it’s a brand new day.